What is Notre Dame’s Catholic identity all about?
Notre Dame is dedicated to uniting superb student-centered learning and outstanding research with a distinctively Catholic identity that grounds and enhances those aims. Notre Dame seeks to embody its Catholic identity in ways that make a positive difference for both Catholic and non-Catholic members of the faculty, staff, and student body. To be a Catholic university is to be committed, in President John Jenkins’ words, to a “wide-open, unconstrained search for truth,” in which matters of meaning, faith, and morality are not simply left at the door in deference to an empty ideal of critical reflection but are assumed in dialogues and debates. Notre Dame is a place where the Church does its thinking, where Catholic teaching and the Catholic intellectual tradition more broadly engage with the wider culture. Notre Dame therefore seeks to maintain a preponderance of Catholic faculty. At the same time, in order that such a dialogue take place, it is necessary that a rich diversity of persp
